The back pressure is waning, and even if nobody looks at their blog entries and self-made videos, if nobody heeds their talkback, young people nonetheless may spend after-school hours in an online youthworld, running up opportunity costs every time they check their
MySpace
page and neglect their English homework, paying for them years later when they can’t read or write well enough to do academic work or qualify for a job, or know enough to answer simple questions about scientific method, Rembrandt, or Auschwitz. Kids will be kids, and teens will be teens. Without any direction from the menu, they stick with what they know and like. They have no natural curiosity for the historical past and high art, and if no respected elder introduces them to Romanticism and the French Revolution, they’ll rarely find such things on their own. With the read/write/ film/view/browse/message/buy/sell Web, adolescent users govern their own exposure, and the didactic and artistic content of smarter sites flies by unseen and unheard.
This is not to say that young people should never play and chat and view and post online. It’s a question of balance. As long as adolescent concerns didn’t take up every leisure hour of the day, as long as mentors now and then impressed the young with the importance of knowledge, as long as book reading held steady, intellectual pursuits maintained some ground in the out-of-school lives of kids. They weren’t required for work or school, but they still contributed to a young person’s formation. They included reading for fun, visiting museums, listening to what music educators call “art music,” browsing in libraries and bookstores, attending theater and dance performances, joining extracurricular groups (such as French Club), and participating in politics, say, by volunteering in a campaign. Such activities exposed young people to complex artistic forms, imparted historical tales and civic principles, and excited moral judgment and ideological fervor. They provided a background knowledge transcending a sophomore’s social world.
In an average 18-year-old’s life, these pursuits can’t come close to rivaling video games, cell phone calls, and Web diversions. Young Americans are no less intelligent, motivated, ambitious, and sensitive than they ever were, and they are no less adolescent and fun-loving, either. It’s not the under-30-year-olds who have changed. What has changed is the threshold into adulthood, the rituals minors undergo to become responsible citizens, the knowledge and skill activities that bring maturity and understanding. Outside the home, the classroom, library, bookstore, museum, field trip, employer, and art space hosted the rituals and fostered the activities. The digital realm could do it, too, but not in the way young Americans use it. When the Internet arrived, video games grew more interactive and realistic, cable reached 300 channels, handhelds and wireless hit the market . . . a new age of hyper-epistemology was heralded, and the adaptive intellects of teens, encased in the cachet of supersmarts, were projected to push thought past the pre-digital frontier. But young Americans did something else, and still do. The popular digital practices of teens and 20-year-olds didn’t and don’t open the world. They close the doors to maturity, eroding habits of the classroom, pulling hours away from leisure practices that complement classroom habits.
And that isn’t all the fault of the juniors, or the technophiles and Web site purveyors. Nor should we put all the blame on the parents who plunk their infants in front of the screen so they might have an hour of rest, or who install a computer in the kids’ bedrooms and expect it to be a learning tool. Parents like technology because it eases the demands of parenting, but they might be a little less inclined to do so if they weren’t led to believe in the intellectual benefits of screen time. When it comes to education, parents take their cue from others, people who set learning standards and legitimize different exposures.
This leads us to another group: the custodians of culture, the people who serve as stewards of civilization and mentors to the next generation. They maintain the pathways into knowledge and taste— the school curriculum, cultural institutions, and cultural pages in newspapers and magazines—guarding them against low standards, ahistoricism, vulgarity, and trendiness. If the pathways deteriorate, don’t blame the kids and parents overmuch. Blame, also, the teachers, professors, writers, journalists, intellectuals, editors, librarians, and curators who will not insist upon the value of knowledge and tradition, who will not judge cultural novelties by the high standards set by the best of the past, who will not stand up to adolescence and announce, “It is time to put away childish things.” They have let down the society that entrusts them to sustain intelligence and wisdom and beauty, and they have failed students who can’t climb out of adolescence on their own.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE BETRAYAL OF THE MENTORS
A few years ago, an activist nonprofit organization, Partners for Livable Communities, sponsored a study of community arts programs for troubled and underserved youth. The project wasn’t much different from many other social inquiries into arts education in and out of school, and during the two years I worked at the National Endowment for the Arts I came across similar surveys and write-ups that had noteworthy backing and wide circulation upon their release but later sat undisturbed in offices and libraries. In this case, the main authors, Shirley Brice Heath and Laura Smyth, produced two artifacts, a resource guide and a video documentary both titled
ArtShow: Youth and Community Development.
With support from the U.S. Department of Education, Carnegie and MacArthur foundations, and General Electric, among others, they documented enterprises in Louisville, the Bronx, Boston, and Cotati, California, chronicling their efforts to rescue dropouts, interviewing their students, and outlining the elements of their success. In several cases, they showed, students failing in school entered the programs and found themselves, channeling their energies in constructive ways, taking inspiration from arts training and overcoming estrangement from math, English, and biology. More than that, the students became entrepreneurs, offering artistic services—as illustrators, muralists, photographers—to individual and corporate customers.
Artists for Humanity in Boston, for instance, started in 1990 with six paid young artists teaching small groups of urban kids, but by the publication of
ArtShow
in 1999, it boasted 50 young artist-teachers paid to mentor 300 students. And instead of operating as a social service organization, Artists for Humanity acted as a nonprofit business, with participants contracting to design T-shirts for Gillette, the Red Sox, and MIT; murals for Fleet Bank; and calendars for small local firms. In 1998, it sold nearly $200,000 in artwork, although its operating expenses exceeded $400,000.
The financial progress is impressive, but in such programs,
ArtShow
maintains, the real measure of success lies elsewhere. The long-term value stems from their human capitalization, the conversion of marginal young Americans into self-sufficient, confident, creative citizens. The resource guide rightly points out the wasted hours of young people’s off-campus lives, emphasizing the lack of elder contact. “Thrown back on either peer interaction or social isolation,” it regrets, “young people during those years most critical for moral development miss repeated and consistent immersion in activities framed within and around pro-social and pro-civic values orientations. ” Left to themselves, teens have no forward direction. Their goals contract and blur into meeting friends and “doing stuff,” and the prospect of becoming a positive contributor to their neighborhood never even crosses their minds. The circle of peers maps their horizon, and the day’s gratifications fulfill their ambition. With no wider understanding of their own prospects or their community, city, or nation’s health, they slide all too inevitably into the desolate portion of teens—close to 30 percent—who enter ninth grade and never make it through twelfth.
The community projects
ArtShow
describes turn these kids around, transforming the empty hours of adolescence into working, learning, maturing routines. Parents are absent, school’s a drag, and jobs pay little, leaving a vacuum that pulls unassisted teens down into dereliction. The projects fill it with constructive, esteem-building activities. Older youths teach younger youths, and as the programs unfold they design and execute concrete art objects they can see and hear and feel. Most important, they observe others doing the same, enjoying a thrill of satisfaction when outsiders actually pay money for what they have created. Trinia works at a fast-food restaurant and helps her ill mother care for eight siblings, but she still sets off for theater rehearsals three times a week. After four years with the troupe she has landed the lead role in an upcoming production. The following September, she hopes to enroll in a local business college. Marcus dropped out of school two years earlier after his older brother went to prison for armed robbery. After several months in and out of detention centers, he now has part-time security and moving jobs, along with a one-year-old daughter. Nevertheless, he attends a youth choral society three times a week, practicing for a solo part in the next season. Marcus, too, aims for college in the fall, a technical school, if he can earn his GED in time. These individuals stand at the cusp of adulthood, and they can go either way. The arts programs prove to be deciding factors, structuring the weeks and disciplining their energy, adding positive accomplishments to the discouraging circumstances at home.
The
ArtShow
inquiry showcases methods of handling the degenerating young lives of Trinia, Marcus, and hundreds more, and it singles out most of all an adjustment in the approach to youth. Instead of regarding youngsters as inferior minds and unformed egos in need of tutoring, educators should treat them as colleagues in creativity, voices at the community table with a unique perspective. The guest preface in the resource guide bears the title “Young People as Partners,” and advocates “taking youth on as serious and necessary partners in sustaining momentum in our learning—individually and organizationally.” The introduction complains that “Few put young people shoulder-to-shoulder with adults in taking on responsibility for the moral, civic, and learning climates of their communities.” Media images of troubled youth spread the skepticism, which has a self-fulfilling effect. The more we mistrust youths, the more youths reject adult guidance. The attitude must change. We should acknowledge, the authors insist, “that young people can lead the way in helping us [adults] see how differences—of talent, culture, and creative preferences—add value to communities.” Indeed, the central lesson of neighborhood programs applies more to elders than to students: “The theories, practices, and illustrative cases given here will help adults gain the confidence and know-how necessary to accept leadership from young people,” to believe in them as “mentors for their younger peers.”
Young people cited in the guide and filmed in the video offer personal testimony to the benefits. A rural girl in Kentucky’s Governor’s School for the Arts found it “weird” to be “working with people that have already focused and have already got their own body of work— enough to call it ‘their work’ and things like that. Well, I realized that I had a lot of talent but I also realized that I needed to focus.” A California student illustrator confesses, “I’m just thrilled to have my artwork in the window here. People driving by, people walking around asking me questions about it.” The co-founder of Artists for Humanity assures, “When we see a project go from pencil and paper to the customer, everyone gets a rush,” and his colleague recalls, “Artists for Humanity gave me a voice when no one else would give me a thought.” Their confidence and creativity mark a jubilant contrast to the dead-end vision of kids stuck on the streets and tuning out in class.
And so, as one pores over the
ArtShow
materials, it is somewhat jarring to hear in one of the video interviews a young artist/mentor sound a stiff negative note about the work. At one point, he remembers the difference between regular art classes in high school and exercises at Artists for Humanity, and as he speaks a proud disdain spills forth.
You go to school, you know, and I’m sitting in class and I, you know, go to the illustration department, and I see kids drawing and painting, everybody draws the exact same boring, traditional way trying to be Picasso or Rembrandt or whoever else, you know, and I’m just trying to be Carlo Lewis, you know, I don’t really care, I don’t want to be Rembrandt, you know, I’m a black guy from [words garbled], that’s who I am.
We don’t know how deeply the attitude runs, or where he got it, or how staunchly the young man shall grip his irreverence in the future, but he plainly finds the contrasts enabling. The factors are antagonistic—great precursors vs. himself, conventional models vs. individual expression—not
and
but
versus.
Tradition and individuality stand opposed, and it doesn’t occur to him that absorbing the former might actually inspire and enhance the latter. Indeed, tradition for him isn’t dormant or neutral. It’s a threat. Originality comes from within, he believes, and only when his individual experience is sheltered from dead influences will it spring forth faithfully. It’s as if he had to clear away the artistic lineage, to reduce the pantheon of artists to “Picasso or Rembrandt or whoever else” in order to create his own space. Regular art class was boring and homogenizing, and studying the masters only alienated the pent-up self. “Imitation is suicide,” Ralph Waldo Emerson decreed in “Self-Reliance,” and a young urban guy 170 years later heeded the rule and cast his art not as devotion to craft or union with a pedigree of creators, but as a way to be himself and nobody else.